Communication devices, such as two-way radios, are used in a variety of environments that have various levels of background noise. Traditional automatic volume control (AVC) usually changes the level of received audio by measuring the environmental level around the listener. Despite what the conditions were at initial user volume selection, AVC will set the volume higher when the background noise increases and set it lower when the background noise decreases. The disadvantage of the traditional AVC, however, is that any user preferences are eliminated. For example, a user might prefer a high volume level in a low background noise environment because he or she was located away from the speaker. Traditional AVC would detect the low background noise condition and immediately set the volume to a lower setting regardless of the user's wishes.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method and apparatus of automatically maintaining volume preferences in a communication device.